[eli]

I don't have a ton of experience with any of them, but fig.yaml looks dramatically simpler and easier to learn than Chef or Puppet. (It also solves a much narrower problem, but I think the point remains.)

What this needs is the ability to be pointed at a working VM - lets say, Ubuntu 13.10 server - and then just figure out whats different about it, compared to the distro release.

It sounds like you want Blueprint (https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint). But careful what you ask for... I found this to not actually be a very useful approach in practice.

[amirmc]

> I found this to not actually be a very useful approach in practice.

Could you expand on this, please? I'm curious to know what the problems were (just so I know what I'm letting myself in for)

[eli]

(Disclaimer: I haven't found any solution I really like... so the problem may be me.)

It turns out that installing and configuring services on a server touches many files and only some of them are important. Even the basic assumption that Ubuntu is the same everywhere wasn't quite right. Linode has some of its own packages installed and I think they tweaked the kernel. Running it in VMWare, you probably have the guest additions installed, etc. These things aren't important, but Blueprint doesn't know that. So I ended up with this massive number of changed files and the tooling for filtering through them to get just the important bits wasn't so hot (or at least it wasn't a year ago).